A book about someone spending a year reading the over twenty-thousand pages of a dictionary does not sound particularly promising — and the author’s statement that: "I think of Reading the OED as the thinking person’s Cliff Notes to the greatest dictionary in the world" isn’t exactly reassuring. On the other hand, what he proposes to do is fairly extraordinary: surely even fewer people read the Oxford English Dictionary cover(s) to cover(s) (there are twenty volumes in the edition he takes on) than climb Everest. Indeed, it is an audacious feat: yes, spread over a whole year, it averages to just less than sixty pages a day — but sixty pages of dictionary-entries, day in and day out ? Who could manage that ? (On the other hand: for a fat book contract, who wouldn’t give it a shot ?)

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